We are Cally Fulton and Danielle Johnson, a mother/daughter real estate team, and we’ve been working together in Seattle since 2004. In September 2012 we launched our new Seattle-based brokerage ADDO Real Estate.
In the early years!
We started our real estate careers at John L Scott, a big name brokerage with an excellent training program, great tools, and a very experienced and very detail-oriented broker.
We couldn’t have asked for a better beginning, as the real estate market was booming and our broker taught us well how to navigate the very real liabilities we faced in each and every transaction we oversaw.
Sustainability, especially in the built environment, has been a part of our lives for a long time, and we decided early on that making this a central part of our real estate careers was essential. People needed to know they had an option for what had sadly become the ‘conventional’ home, so we focused our outreach on how to make homes healthier, more resource efficient and eco-friendly.
We soon learned that while there was a strong community of like-minded folks in Seattle, especially in the building industry, there was no one in the real estate industry able to represent them. There were buyers looking for green homes, and certainly plenty of builders building them, but there were no agents able to truly connect the two.
Thus began our search for others who might be interested in learning how to be a ‘green agent’, and what we found was GreenWorks Realty, which was the first brokerage in Seattle to focus almost exclusively on green homes. We transferred to GreenWorks in 2005 when they were just getting off the ground, which meant actively participating in helping to grow the company. Opening an office in Greenwood, creating green agent trainings, attracting other like-minded agents, building the tool base needed to market green homes and more. We dove right in and were rewarded by attracting the attention of green builders like Martha Rose Construction, who had homes that needed selling.
When the real estate boom in Seattle began ebbing in early 2008, it became apparent that big changes were around the corner and we were going to have to adapt or die. We joined forces with another GreenWorks co-founder and started Infiniti Real Estate & Development. We would continue to specialize in green homes, but also get our feet wet managing our own brokerage, with the goal of staying open to the demands of a quickly changing market.
In many ways this ended up being the reason we were able to sustain ourselves when the market eventually crashed. Low overhead, flexible commissions for those already losing so much, and the ability to adapt the company to what we and our clients needed. We knew this would only be a stepping stone, a time to hunker down and hone our ideas about how a brokerage should be run. So, when the market began to look up in 2012, we decided it was time to move on.
Thus ADDO Real Estate was born, and to be honest, we finally feel like we’re home! Addo is a latin verb (long ‘o’) meaning ‘to give, bring, place, / inspire, cause, / add, join’, which we felt resonated well with what we do in our work. We hope you agree!
It’s not our intention to become a big name brokerage with hundreds of agents and a fancy office. ADDO RE will instead be a boutique brokerage with a strong team of very knowledgeable folks (not just real estate agents), passionate about sustainability. We will focus on residential real estate, but provide a number of related services, including consulting on community development, healthy homes, aging in place, home design and more. And of course, we will continue to keep our overhead low, so that we can provide our great services at flexible rates.
We invite you to browse our new website at addoreseattle.com, and give us a call any time! We are excited about the launch of our new company, and we love to chat!